This Is Us (2014)
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day 1807a: Quinn doesn't know what's happening at first, only that Rachel wants her to come down to the mall in her new dress. - Runaway Bride series - 5TH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE, day 1a of 21


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 86th cycle. Now cycle 87!_

**_IT'S THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE OF_**_** GLEEKATHON!** - Five years! Five years! *insert flailing* Okay, not quite, but by the end of this cycle, it will have been five years of daily stories (sometimes twice a day! ... and for seven very frightening days a couple years back, three times a day!). It will also be the end of this crazy ride. I started thinking about ending gleekathon months ago, and I wanted to finish my ongoing series before that happened. It made it so I could finish out this fifth year, and it couldn't be any better that this cycle is actually ending on October 22nd 2014, which was the day it began, in 2009... Now here we go!_

**This story is a 1st person POV swap of _For All We Know_, a Runaway Bride series story originally posted on December 11th 2013.**

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><p><strong>"This Is Us"<br>_Quinn (POV)/Rachel  
><em>Runaway Bride series**

I got the dress out of the closet. I hadn't worn it yet, not exactly the kind of dress I would wear at school. Rachel had made me buy it, and now she wanted me to wear it and meet her. I don't know what she's got planned, but there is a plan, I know that. She's been going around with that little smirk of hers like she thinks I can't see she's up to something. I pretended like I didn't see. Whatever she was doing, she was excited about it, and if she was happy, then so was I…

I couldn't find her at first, and I must have passed by her once or twice before I heard my name, and turned, and… and… I blinked, hard. Rachel was always beautiful, don't get me wrong. I'd spent months trying to tell myself I wasn't feeling anything every time I saw her, and she saw me, to tell myself to ignore it, before I'd found a way to face the way I really felt. But tonight… The dress was new, too, and it didn't belong at school any more than mine did, but it did belong on a date.

After the shock wore off… sort of… I did see why I hadn't noticed her before. She was standing in line, at the front of a line, outside a restaurant. She was nervous, she was smiling… I smiled, too. What was she up to, there was no way…

"You're not actually planning for us to eat here, are you?" I asked her. She was looking at her phone again, then looking at me, at my dress, the same way she did when she got me to buy it. "It's their busiest night, especially at this hour," I told her, looking into the restaurant. Rachel was ambitious, and I loved that about her, but we were going to stand here for ages waiting to get in if this was really what she had in mind. I saw her look back at her phone again. She wasn't worried at all.

"I know," she said. I watched her smile all of a sudden, and she tilted her head to the doors. "Come on," she went up to the woman at the door, and I followed. It wasn't that I didn't think Rachel Berry couldn't talk her way into that place, but… "Sorry, I think there's a table now," she said, and I could have asked her how she knew that, but I looked at the hostess, and she looked… annoyed, that special brand of annoyance that could only have come from having been left at Rachel's mercy for any amount of time. She looked like she was this close to mouthing off at her, and I was ready to throw it right back in her face… but then she looked, and I looked, and there really was an empty table, already being reset.

"Right," the woman picked up some menus and led us in. I don't know what my face looked like at that moment, but I'd have to go with stunned.

"How did you…"

Wait, hold on… Was that… It is… What are they doing here? First Rachel had gotten into this restaurant, and now Santana and Brittany, too? The way I'd heard people talk about it, it was almost impossible to get in there. And they were smirking, they were… at that table… so we could get it. Now we were sitting, facing each other, and I leaned in so she could hear me. "What have you been up to?" She looked so proud of herself… I was kind of proud of her, too.

"There's a lot of people around here, aren't there? It's kind of loud, I hope you don't mind. Guess we'll just have to mind our own business." I wanted to kiss her, just for that smile. She'd pulled off her big reveal, she had her victory. I smiled back, and my cheeks were burning, heart tripping. Rachel Berry had some kind of superpower about getting what she wanted, and she'd used it for me.

"Fancy place for a date, I'm going to develop a standard," I told her, and she laughed.

"I can keep up." I took a breath, and I reached for her hand.

"I bet you can."

I should have been more impressed to be in this place, but once it was just the two of us, and we were talking, the whole loud place went away. I played right into Rachel's hand, trying to get her to tell me what we would do after dinner, and she ate it up… We left the restaurant still laughing, and we were going to see a movie.

"So, same tactic then? What's crowded right now?" I asked, and Rachel was back on her game.

"Oh, no, not this time. We need something more low key, something… something we won't mind missing parts of." I had to hand it to her, she'd thought it through. The theater was deserted, we made a dozen, tops.

"Down in front, those lower rows," I showed her. She wasn't convinced.

"No one goes there. It's way too close." I smiled.

"Yeah, exactly." Now she got it. "You're not the only one with tricks up your sleeve, you know?"

When it was just us, in the dark, down in front, I took her hand. How many times had we watched movies together, at her house, or mine, and this… This was everything we'd been doing, multiplied time and time over. We were isolated, out front, and in time we took advantage of it. I leaned over and kissed her, and it felt like we were daring anyone to see us, to know we belonged together, even if they couldn't see us. I couldn't have recalled even a tenth of what the movie was about, but I could detail Rachel's lips, her tongue, her hands…

The movie had ended in spite of us, and now we were sitting back in our own seats, with the lights turned on. "If we stayed here, would they kick us out?" Rachel asked me, and I bit back a laugh.

"We could always try. Until someone notices us, there's nothing to stop us, is there? We can say we got the wrong time on our tickets. Besides," I told her after we'd sunk down further out of sight into our seats, "I wouldn't mind seeing the movie again… Kind of missed a few bits."

"I just want to stay here, with you," Rachel said, and I didn't care about the lights. I kissed the girl I loved.

"There's nowhere else I want to be right now." We sat through the movie a second time. We saw even less of it that time.

THE END

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><p><strong>AN: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
><strong>**In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
><strong>**always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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